Summer reading. The phrase calls up different memories, different emotions, depending on how old you are. If you’re my age (or you’ve seen the memes), it may bring you back to those halcyon days when you were tracking each book you read in the pursuit of a free personal pan pizza. Depending on what school you went to, it may cause you to recall those last few hours before a new school year began, binging A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Of Mice and Men, even though you had two months with virtually no responsibilities in which to get it done. For a lot of people, it brings to mind the beach or the pool, where you set up on a towel or a chair and pull out a romance novel, a potboiler mystery, a spy thriller, or whatever it is that you connect to. Whatever the specifics of your personal relationship with books, it seems very curious to me that people have settled on the summer as the time to read.

And we can blame teachers and Pizza Hut all we want, but there’s something that makes us all reach for that to-be-read pile during the summer months. Any book lover will tell you that we add to that pile constantly, most of us have stacks and shelves (or files bursting with digital downloads) of books that we know we have no hope of finishing in our lifetime, barring one of those Twilight Zone scenarios and minus the poor eyesight. That doesn’t stop us from piling new books on, of course, as we constantly tell ourselves and our partners that we need to be grateful it’s books and not, for example, meth. As that pile gets bigger and bigger, summertime is the only time where it seems to dip a little (or at least grow more slowly). 

This is even true for those of us who, through a terrible confluence of biology and neurochemistry, happen to love both books and our own children. In my entire life, there has never been a single event that slowed down my reading more than the birth of my son. And he’s worth it, of course. I love him to death, and I make sure to tell him that every time I look at the 17 books Stephen King has published since his last haircut that I haven’t gotten around to consuming yet.

The good news, parents, is that kids get older, and eventually they do reach a point that makes it a little easier to start reading again, and this summer seems to have finally gotten my family to that sweet spot. Of course, we did need a little help. Our local public library, as they always do, has issued a “summer reading challenge” to its patrons, both children and adults. There are prizes (no pizza, sadly), and of course, bragging rights, and the weird thing is that having this carrot dangling in front of us has really worked for my family.

The St. Charles Parish Public Library is affiliated with a reading app called “Beanstack,” which allows you to track your reading time, track books you’ve read, even track the number of pages read (although I personally have not taken advantage of this feature, as most of the books I read these days are eBooks, and tracking the pages isn’t always easy). You can write reviews as well, and share your reading with others. You earn points and badges. I got a free umbrella. It’s kind of goofy that a grown ass adult (or whatever I am) would need to treat reading books like accumulating a high score on a video game, but by God, it worked.

My summer ends next week, when the teachers at my school report back for a few days of professional development in advance of the avalanche of students the week after, but when it comes to reading, I’ve really taken advantage of this summer. Since school let out in May, I’ve recorded 80 different reading sessions, 20 different books, and a whopping 2578 minutes of reading time, most of that at night before bed, because knowing I don’t have to wake up at 5 am makes me feel a little more free to stay up late with a book like I did when I was a kid. My wife – who is not a teacher and thus does not have the summer away from work – hasn’t quite matched my numbers, but she’s also found herself reading more thanks to the use of the app. There’s something oddly communal about the experience, knowing that other people in the system are reading as well, trying to stack up their numbers, and having fun doing it.

The communal aspect, I think, is one of the things that makes it work. I can see how many reading minutes everybody signed up for the Library system has accumulated over the summer (currently hovering at about 2.1 million, which means some of you people have been slacking), and there’s something about knowing that other people are reaching for the same goal as you are at the same time that makes it a little bit easier and a little bit more exciting. It’s the same reason people share their steps from a Fitbit, the same reason so many of us jump into NaNoWriMo every November. You’re aiming for a goal that you always have on some level. It’s easier to go after that goal when you know you’re not doing it alone.

Those 20 books that I’ve dug into, by the way, are also in pursuit of various smaller goals. Most of them are in series or by authors I enjoy, but that I’ve never gotten around to finishing. I’ve started a re-read of all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels (in case you were wondering why I wrote about that back at the beginning of summer) with the intention of continuing on and reading the other books in the “Famous Forty” that weren’t written by him, most of which I’ve never read before. I’ve read a few Star Trek novels. I’ve read books in George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series and Hugh Howey’s Silo saga. I’ve even tackled two of those Stephen King books that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. He wrote four more in the time that it took me, but baby steps. 

The only problem I’ve got with Beanstack is that I don’t think you can add friends from outside your own library system, so I don’t know that all of you fine folks out there could link up with me there – although if anybody knows of a similar app that’s not geographically-locked, by all means let me know. And while you’re at it, let me know how your own summer reading has gone. What have you read on the beach, what books have finally escaped your-to-read pile, and do you too feel like you read more when the heat is on?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Blake is also considering doing a total read-through of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson universe, but that dang Stephen King keeps adding other books he need to get to first.